I have recounted this anecdote before in my blog,* but I am prompted to repeat it by the fact that the Office of National Statistics has just released the results of the 1921 Census, and everybody seems to be rushing to find out additional details of their family histories. Ancestry and similar genealogical services must be enjoying a boom!
During the Second World War my father was in the RAF, and spent a good part of his service in India and the Indian Ocean. He was fond of telling the story of his discovery of a Russian branch of the Allcock family. There was an occasion when he found himself billeted with a young serviceman from New Zealand, and was surprised to discover that they had a common surname. This was surprising because relatively few people spell the name with the double L. He assumed that there must be some family connection, but the New Zealander said that this was unlikely because his own family actually had come to New Zealand from Russia. When they began to look into this it emerged that perhaps the connection was not improbable.
My father’s family had run a profitable firm of brass-founders, in Aston (Birmingham). They had acquired a reputation for the quality of their work, and had produced the famous sphinx mascot for the high-end Armstrong-Siddley cars. The New Zealander said that one of his ancestors had been recruited by the Tsar particularly in order to produce a set of elaborate brass gates for one of the Russian royal residences. The contract finished, they had remained in Russia until the Revolution. At this point they were clearly unwelcome, both and foreigners and as people having links to the royal family, and had fled to New Zealand. Perhaps there was a link after all! I don’t suppose we will ever know the truth of there matter, but it does make a good story.
I haver decided that my exhibition in April will be entitled About Time, as I think that the theme of time, in various ways, runs through a great deal of my work. I don’t expect that I will be producing pieces based on the Legend of the Russian Allcocks. I have found on several occasions in the past that when I do introduce elements of personal history into my pictures they do become rather obscure from the point of view of the general viewer. It is possible that I might smuggle in a small number of these, just in order to give a more complete sense of the range of my work. Generally speaking, however, I shy away from the suggestion that art can attempt to communicate through some kind of private language of references.
*Back in 2015, so a decent interval has elapsed, I think.